I think:I am going to need considerably more coffee.
“I need to go,” I say, to no one in particular, which is also to all of them.
“You just got here,” Jack protests.
“And now I’m leaving.” I put money on the counter and slide off the stool. “The eggs were excellent, thank you.”
“Come back tomorrow,” Tristan says, and it’s not pushy. It’s an offer. An open door, which is different.
“I’ll think about it,” I reply. This is a lie, and possibly also not a lie, which is its own problem.
Archer says nothing as I pass him, but I feel his gaze like a hand between my shoulder blades.Jack says something that I don’t quite catch, and from the sound of it, Archer tells him to stop. Tristan is already moving to clear my plate. And from the corner table, the one who hasn’t spoken a single word this entire time, I feel his gaze watching me go.
All the way out the door and down the two steps onto the cobblestones, I feel all of them. Not chasing. Not crowding. Just existing in my direction with an attention that has no aggression in it.
And the partial bond, pulling gently, like a tide I didn’t consent to and cannot entirely resent because the man it connects me to just sat at the counter and gave me exactly the space I needed and didn’t fake asingle thing about it.
I have no idea how to proceed with that.
I shove my hands in my jacket pockets and walk.
The mark on my neck is warm in the morning air.
I don’t turn around.
But my heart is racing, which it does not have permission to do, and my palms are warmer than they should be. That damn pressure in the air that I felt when I drove into this valley is here too, right here on Main Street in the morning light, and it is entirely different from danger.
I’ve been in danger. I know what danger feels like. This is something else.
I have problems. I have real, serious, legally actionable problems that require my full brain. I do not have the bandwidth for four inexplicably compelling men in a small town I’m not staying in.
I walk faster.
It does not help with the feeling.
Chapter 5
Jack
Here’s what most people get wrong about me: They think the chaos is the whole thing.
It’s not. The chaos is the surface. It’s my forward momentum, my grin, my tendency to follow interesting things at speed without consulting the part of my brain that handles consequences. That’s real, all of it, I’m not faking any of it. But underneath the chaos is something that is very, very good at reading situations.
I read situations. And the situation I’m currently in, sitting at the counter of Tristan’s café watching Lola eat eggs with the focus of someone who hasn’t had a proper meal in days, is the following:
I bit her.
While having sex with her. I bit an Omega I’d known for two hours and created a partial bond she didn’t agree to. We were getting along so well, having so much fun, and then… yep. I’m not proud of my lack of restraint.
And now she’s here.
In my town. In my pack’s café. Eating Tristan’s eggs and arguing with Archer, which under any other circumstances, I would find the most entertaining thing to happen this week.
Currently I find it the second-most complicated thing to happen this week.
I sit at the counter and I say nothing and I let her have the space, because space is the only thing I have to offer right now that she might actually want.
Ryan sent me a look when we walked in. Not a surprised look—Ryan doesn’t do surprised, Ryan processes and responds and the processing is invisible—but the look that meansI felt this last night and I’ve been waiting for the context and here it is.I gave him the context at two in the morning and he gave me the framework:give her space, let her come to it, don’t push.
